Twitter’s New Media Permission Policy ⇥ blog.twitter.com
There are growing concerns about the misuse of media and information that is not available elsewhere online as a tool to harass, intimidate, and reveal the identities of individuals. Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm. The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities. When we receive a report that a Tweet contains unauthorized private media, we will now take action in line with our range of enforcement options.
Emma Bowman, NPR:
Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, tweeted that the rule is “written so broadly that most anyone can lodge a complaint against anyone.”
Public figures are exempt from the policy, Twitter said. The social media company assured users that “context matters,” and that its private information policy “includes many exceptions in order to enable robust reporting on newsworthy events and conversations that are in the public interest.”
Brooking added that a lot hinges on those last two words.
Chad Loder is maintaining a thread of legitimate public interest stories that are being curtailed because of this policy. Accounts are being locked from months-old retweets of photos being taken by journalists in public. Twitter’s whole thing is its firehose of information, its misapplication of this policy is kneecapping the use cases that make the platform so valuable.